Haven for heart patients

NST: The Kuala Lumpur Hospital is probably the best place to seek treatment in the event of a heart attack.
Not only will doctors start treatment in the first 15 minutes of arrival, one can be assured of aggressive treatment soon after in the coronary care unit.
The speedy treatment won the department the National Quality Award 2005 in December.
The Director-General of Health’s trophy and the RM5,000 award may not seem much, but the real prize is the improvement in death rates since 2003.
HKL Consultant Pulmonary and Critical Care Physician Datuk Dr Jeyaindran Sinnadurai said the treatment regime had led to the death rate falling from 15.9 per cent to less than five per cent.
"We want to reduce the death rate even further," he told the New Straits Times.
Dr Jeyaindran said the survival chances of heart attack victims improved dramatically with faster treatment.
"We were the first hospital in the country to start treating patients with heart attacks in the A&E department itself."
He said HKL had managed to achieve world standards in diagnosing and treating patients with heart attacks.
"It is a must now that a person diagnosed with heart attack be started on appropriate immediate treatment and aggressive treatment in the CCU after that," he said.
Dr Jeyaindran said procedures were computerised for medical assistants and doctors to expedite the diagnosis of patients with heart attacks.
"Good clinical practice for all patients with chest pain due to acute coronary syndrome is to have an ECG and be given 300mg of crushed aspirin within 10 minutes of arrival at an A&E," he said.
Dr Jeyaindran said a patient walking in and complaining of chest pain would have medical assistants asking whether he was a heart disease patient, a smoker, a diabetic, suffered from hypertension or had high cholesterol.
"Once confirmed, an electrocardiogram is done and if it shows ongoing chest pain suggestive of heart disease, the patient is taken to a special area where the doctor immediately administers appropriate treatment," he said.
Sixty-one per cent of the country’s 24 million people have at least one risk factor for heart disease.
He said coronary artery disease could begin early in life and was aggravated by various known conventional risk factors including smoking, diabetes and hypertension.
"Many studies have shown that reducing or optimising control of these risk factors can reduce cardiac mortality," he said.